I knew it would happen, I fucking knew it. This last week I have finally dropped into the pitiful existence I knew would come from going back to working a day job. By the end of each day I've been so utterly physically and emotionally knackered that I just piss the few evening hours away in a stupor before getting up the next morning to do it all over again.

The job has taken me over, I've barely read, and haven't written, a thing all week and it's messing me up. Friday night slipped by, empty and sour, before I spent Saturday morning with my Grandma. Her Alzheimer's is just a little bit worse each time I go and, to be honest, it's painful to see.

Got in from that yesterday and felt something building, a kind of sickly, nervous tension. It took a while but I eventually recognise this as an impending panic attack. Butterflies, unable to stay still, breathing won't slow down etc.

Anyway, I held off a full blown attack but could only manage to hold myself in that 'impending' limbo by forcing myself to watch mindnumbing TV until sleep finally came. Haven't felt this bad for a while and not reading/writing is definitely a factor. Today, finally, I feel up to trying to remedy that and what better subject to explore than my favourite number, 3.

3 can be a bitch...

Work's been particularly for me tough recently and the reasons for this can be spilt into three loose categories. Firstly there's where this job fits into my life, ie. it's supposed to be a temp day job. I'm there for the wage and get nothing else from it all.

Recently however I had to take a day off to go to the dentists and have my assessment for counselling at MIND. In order to make this time up I've been taking twenty minute lunches and staying late every day. So this job that is supposed to be a mindless but necessary source of cash is actually taking everything I've got.

Then there's the carrot. There's a chance that, "maybe in a couple of months," my council department will be getting an information officer. Now this job involves a lot of the stats and monitoring I'm currently responsible for but instead of arranging work and speaking to tenants I'd have to write copy for council newsletters and websites.

Not only would this be closer to what I really want to be doing, and thereby possibly more bearable, but it's a shedload more money as well. The problem is that this job may never actually materialise and I can see myself, if I'm not careful, sitting in that damn office waiting for a chance to escape while my life passes me by.

The second string to this particularly unpleasant bow is the actual practical nature of the job. Frustrated at every turn, the only thing worse than being forced to do a shitty job is being forced to do it badly. The combination of woefully ignorant managers; ludicrously unreliable and frustrating IT systems and a sudden, massive upsurge in workload has made this job the most stressful work I've ever done.

The third and final part of this is me, or rather the current state of my mental health. I had my assessment at MIND to get on a course of counselling but I now have to wait, 'a little while' (?) until they find someone who can fit me in.

The first lot of counselling I had, at the excellent Burley Lodge Centre, had a significant effect on me and I felt I was taking the first steps to dealing with my problems, ie. recognising them. Now though, that course having finished, I find myself in this limbo where I've stopped ignoring things but am suddenly without the support and advice I apparently need to face them.

The short and the skinny of this is that I'm not in the best frame of mind to be dealing with a lot of stress at work. Now when I came out of 'Sympathy For Mr Vengeance'(1) I heard people criticising it as a bad film because watching it had been an unpleasant experience. For me however the value lies in how powerful the work is, not whether the vibe is positive or negative.

In the same way I find trying to look at things in threes, rather than twos, can be a very powerful tool. The better view of things this may give however, isn't necessarily a nice one.

...but 2 is always worse

Been a bit concerned recently by the recent flapping about regarding the European Bill of Human Rights. One argument I heard on BBCN24, from someone who was in favour of ditching our commitment the bill, made it clear to me that there is a great deal of ignorance surrounding the nature of this, now infamous piece of legislation.

The argument ran that we should only be obliged to uphold the rights detailed in the bill under certain circumstances or for people from certain 'good' countries. Now I have to admit I did shout at the TV at this point, human rights, HUMAN.

The whole point of these rights are that they are the birthright of every human being alive. Regardless of who you are, where you're from or, most importantly, what you have done, your DNA entitles you to these rights. Simple as, end of.

To suggest that human rights should only be afforded to certain people of your choosing is to say that those you do not choose are in someway less human than those you do. Hmmm, classifying people into superior and inferior groups and treating them accordingly, these are the seeds of genocide people. Regardless of good intentions or so called practical necessities, this is nothing more than thinly veiled elitism and elitism invariably leads to suffering.

Now the main reason I've given in the past for considering things in threes rather than twos, (or any even number,) is to avoid polarisation. The current 'debate' of human rights vs national security is an absolutely textbook example.

This so called debate can yield nothing, absolutely nothing, because it is so ludicrously limited that it will never encompass the causes of the problems on both sides. When we let issues, especially issues as important as these, be boiled down to us vs them, one basic idea vs another, we are screwed.

It is insane to consider human rights and national security as isolated, let alone opposing, issues. Society just doesn't work like this. It is fair to say that, in fact, that violations of human rights are a significant contributing factor to many of the current threats to our nation's security.

If we at least tried to ensure that the rights in this ill understood bill were upheld globally, ie. if we made the quality of life of the human race our priority, many of the just grievances that give rise to security threats would not arise in the first place.

The biggest threat to our national security are suicidally blinkered arguments like these. We're being distracted from the real problems and subsequently any hope of finding their resolution. This is why three is better than two, if you set up your debate in a minimum three way split it's just so much more difficult to fall into this trap.

sometimes 3 can look like 2

One good thing did come out of my almost-panic attack, which I can still feel lurking on the edge of my consciousness, and that was a revelation. I honestly believe that the very reason for our existence is to experience moments like these, that golden spark when an idea just appears in your head.

I was thinking about what the panic attack was, trying to pull apart its nature. I realised that the best way I could describe the feeling in my case was as a disconnect between mind and body. While my mind is numb and exhausted, my body is experiencing abject terror.

All the physical symptoms of intense fear are present but without the accompanying sensory input and mental quickening. Mentally there is just confusion and concern, frustration and sadness. A distinct separation, two independent parts of me.

Only that's not the whole picture.

Recently I had the pleasure of hosting here a wonderful debate on the nature of consciousness during which the idea of a soul came up. Now I felt secure in my position that no such thing exists but was irritated by my inability to provide an explanation for the instinctive feeling that it does.

At the time I simply stated that I felt the feelings of consciousness, and of having some non physical part to us, came from our inability to fully comprehend our own complexity. I suggested that these were illusions, necessary tools for life until we evolve to a point where we can dig who and what we really are.

Well, thinking about panic attacks took me to other similar feelings, times when the physicality of a situation overwhelms reasoned thought. The physical reflex to something unexpected or the loss of conscious control reached at sexual climax were the two examples I could think of.

It was at this point that I noticed a flaw in my thinking. Splitting mind and flesh tends to take the form of brain from frame but this is wrong. Our bodies do not perform those instinctive physical actions on their own, it's that archaic lump of grey matter atop our spinal columns that drives them.

We have, in effect, two brains. The brain stem, the bit we share with the rest of the animals, is the bit that tells our hearts to beat, tells to us fuck and eat, gets us angry or makes us run fast when we have to. The great swollen lobes taking up most of our domed craniums are the reason machines, the bits we think with.

The great and golden flash which made me, just for a second, glad to be alive, was that this instinctive perception of a soul, of ourselves as being non-physical within physical, is actually how we perceive our two brains. When you think you're detecting the non-physical, the soul, what you're actually perceiving is the contrast between the older and newer parts of your brain.

Great, a solid new point to air in that age old debate, but where does the three come in? Isn't this a pretty clear case of two? Well no, because there's something else. There's the old brain, and the new brain, but there's also what they form together.

Without the frontal brain bulge we'd still be beasts, but without the brain stem we simply couldn't survive. 1 + 1 only equals 2 because the 1's are identical. In this case the total is more than just the sum of its parts. There are both the new and the old brains to explore and understand but there is also the person this combination creates.

The point of the habit of three is to force us to take a step back, to look at just one more angle before throwing ourselves in. As low as I am right now, and as painfully dull as life is, it's ideas like these that keep me alive. Maybe one day I can dedicate myself to their pursuit full time and finally get the hell out of this dirty, deadly game we call everyday life.

footnote

(1) a fantastic Korean film from the same director and 'ultra violence' genre as the better known 'Oldboy',